David Kanter | Getting your money's worth

Most students at Penn and other highly selective institutions are smart - at least book smart.

Throughout high school, they received good grades and earned top test scores. Four years at an elite college or university is then supposed to accelerate their academic growth.

But is an expensive undergraduate education from Penn or another selective institution really more academically enriching than one from a less venerated and perhaps less expensive school? To truly answer this question, we need an objective means to find out.

In her article "Testing Harvard," Linda Wertheimer, the education editor of The Boston Globe, examined the forward-thinking means by which Harvard is hoping to evaluate its own ability to teach undergrads.

Wertheimer says that in the fall of 2006, interim President Derek Bok had a group of freshmen take a standardized test known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). A group of Harvard seniors was then going to take the test, and Bok was hoping to gauge whether the seniors showed improvement when compared to their freshman counterparts.

The CLA is a product of the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), a nonprofit organization concerned with the quality of higher education. The CAE touts its exam as a means for an institution to determine its role in contributing to the academic growth of its students.

Although the organization doesn't use the multiple choice format familiar to the SATs, it still in many ways resembles those abhorred standardized tests you remember from high school.

For instance, one portion of the test calls on students to synthesize information from a collection of documents in order to respond to a set of open response questions. Sound familiar to the AP U.S. History exam you took in high school?

Although the written synthesis of information is certainly a valid skill in nearly all disciplines, should it really be one of the central means of determining the academic growth of a math, mechanical engineering or finance major? I think not.

And even in the humanities and social sciences - where the written synthesis of information is fundamental - a ninety-minute task probably doesn't do justice when academic growth and maturity are based squarely upon the development of laborious, exacting research skills. Remembering the inaccuracy of standardized tests from high school, College freshman Akiva Dworkin put it nicely: "I don't know if [the CLA] would prove too much."

But the fact that the CLA probably doesn't work doesn't solve our problem. We still need a method to objectively measure the academic improvement of Penn students relative to students at other schools.

To solve this problem, I propose that Penn initiates a collaborative effort with a host of other colleges and universities to create "major-specific assessments."

Teams of faculty members from the participating schools would devise assessments appropriate for each major or concentration. So, for instance, political science professors with an expertise in American politics would devise the guidelines for the assessment for students studying U.S. politics.

The assessment itself shouldn't be a single exam. Instead, it could be similar to a senior thesis or a portfolio of research papers. Teams of professors from different institutions would then evaluate the assessments without knowing which schools those assessments came from.

For instance, professors from American, Syracuse and Brown would grade a Penn student's portfolio without being aware it was a Penn student's. This manner of grading would minimize subjectivity.

Using this method, perhaps some schools - some expected, some unexpected - would consistently perform better in particular disciplines. Other institutions could then learn from the methods used by the successful schools.

Still, major-specific assessments can't become the be-all and end-all of a college education. As Political Science department chair Avery Goldstein noted, for many, "growth [during college] would be in intellectual maturity that might not be measurable or, more accurately, might not show up in measures we can easily devise."

Goldstein has a point. Even the most flawless assessment can't really measure true growth - academic or otherwise.

Regardless, it would still be nice to know if Penn really deserves its "elite" designation. Perhaps the results of major-specific assessments would show that those who confuse Penn and Penn State aren't that misguided after all.

David Kanter is a College freshman from East Falmouth, Mass. His e-mail is kanter@dailypennsylvanian.com. David Versus Goliath appears on Wednesdays.

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